Goodbye Meteorologists?

If you work as a Meteorologist, this one has to scare you a bit.

TechRadar reports that Google is out with DeepMind, its AI research lab, has unveiled a generative model which can forecast the weather with incredible accuracy, up to 15 days in advance.

In simple terms, GenCast is an AI model that's similar to ChatGPT. The difference with GenCast is that it’s been specifically adapted to the Earth’s geometry. Fed with recent weather data, it’s able to generate future weather scenarios and suggest the most probable outcome.

The team at DeepMind trained GenCast on archival weather data collected between 1979 and 2018. This included temperature, wind speed and air pressure readings from around the globe. Based on this, the model was able to learn global weather patterns.

To test its effectiveness, Google then compared the model’s predictions against the industry’s current best forecasting tool, the Ensemble Forecast (ENS).

The model was asked to generate a forecast for 2019, with 1,320 combinations of variables and lead times. GenCast was more accurate than ENS 97.2% of the time. For forecasts more than 36 hours in advance, that increased to 99.8%. That accuracy also applied to the prediction of extreme weather events, such as tropical cyclones.

What’s even more remarkable is that, according to DeepMind, it took a single Google Cloud Tensor Processing Unit v5 – the circuits that Google uses to accelerate machine learning tasks – only eight minutes to produce a 15-day forecast. Traditional ensemble forecasts take several hours to complete, running on supercomputers with thousands of processors.

How long before media companies start using this and kick their Mets to the curb?